this game doesn't respect your time. progression is extremely slow and there's very little explanation for many of the mechanics of the game. when there's many unintuitive design choices in the game (alchemy, zombie work efficiency, even something as simple as FISHING), there should be an explanation. audio mixing is terrible in the game (sfx is as low as possible but rain/waterfall cuts through music at it's highest and distracts me a lot). movement is so slow and the distances between areas is so long that it takes up half a day to get to another location, which is frustrating. i expected there to be horses in the game (considering how it's in the front of the store page) to make the commuting easier, but there isn't which is false advertising and quite disappointing.

there should be an explanation as to why the player has to build 3 different facilities to do the SAME thing (distillation cube, alchemy mill, hand mixer, exist to convert raw materials into extracts/powders) when it can be consolidated into 1 station so players can easily access it. also when you study a material it tells you what it can be decomposed into, but doesn't explain WHICH station decomposes it or if the station should be the upgraded version of that station or not, which is frustrating to understand. there's no way to know how to mix the right materials to make the things you want and the logic behind it. to make a health potion i need health powder (makes sense) and combine it with CHAOS SOLUTION (???) where is the logic in that? having to refer to reddit posts or a wiki for basic things like finding materials should not be this difficult, especially when this can be solved in a box of text.

zombies are useful, but considering how long it takes to wait for materials to make zombies is really annoying. having to wait 5 in game days to get faith that can build 1 zombie (mid-game state) when there is so many things to balance in the game (mining, woodcutting, farming, winery, TRANSPORTING the materials back and forth) which require 1 zombie each per station (except when they need 1 zombie to transport the materials from the mining/woodcutting, etc). It is extremely slow to get zombies in order to automate the monotonous parts of the game. zombie work efficiency is not explained to the player and making them more efficient is only possible by looking up a guide. a block of text could've fixed this (explaining how to raise efficiency, what materials used to raise efficiency, etc.)

fishing makes no sense in this game, which was surprising to me. i have to catch insects (which can only be done by unlocking it on the farming section of the progression tree) to make bait for fish to bite (which is % chance of appearing in certain fishing areas scattered throughout the map). each of the 5 fishing areas have their own fish but there's no logic to it (tilapia is a freshwater fish but can be fished in a SWAMP?). lures are needed to fish certain fish but there's no explanation as to which fish needs it and doesn't justify their exorbitant prices considering how early in the game you need it and how limited in use they are.

quest progression is really slow in this game. they throw objectives at the player early on and make them stumble in the dark when there's little to no resources on how to do it. when the requirements are so high to finish quests and so many quests to do, it feels sluggish to progress in the game and is very unapproachable as a starting player. i'm not asking for there to be a way to make a "get rich quick" scheme to make quests go faster, but to tweak the requirements a little lower to make it easier to progress in the game, especially with so much late game DLC to go through.

a lot of problems can be solved in this game by looking it up on the wiki, but when i have to click off the game every 30 seconds to find the right materials and how to make them, it starts to frustrate me. i had to look for the right i wish there could be something that keeps track of what i want to build (to-do list and required materials) instead of having to go back and forth to areas and looking at blueprints and then memorizing what i need. there is too many things to keep track of in this game, and memorizing building requirements should not be one of them cluttering my head in what's supposed to be a chill farming simulator.

If you ever thought Stardew Valley could do with more corpses, this might be the game for you!

There are a billion things to manage which is somewhat interesting but quickly gets overwhelming. The gameplay loop itself is fine but there are a lot of small problems which makes the game feel very time gated and or scummy at times. The quests are not well designed. You have to wait a lot for some of them because of the week system (some very important characters only appear once a week). Progression is pretty cool and fun but for some reason the huge tech tree lets you unlock nodes that you cannot yet utilize which makes your spent ability points ultimately go to the void until you can actuall access that specific thing by unlocking other nodes which relate to them somehow. The refugee dlc was fun IMO. The tavern wasn't bad either. The soul dlc I almost never used even though I built the machines and did some quests for. All in all even though I complained a lot here, the game made me keep playing so I can say its fine.